Ben Holt
Staff Software Engineer at Artisight
Montpelier, Vermont, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Holt is a Staff Software Engineer with 10+ years of backend expertise, currently building healthcare technology at Pearl Health from his base in Montpelier, Vermont. He brings deep experience scaling APIs and services gained from senior roles at edX—where he extended LMS and course-discovery APIs and improved mobile upsell flows—and a long tenure at Apple working across iTunes, Objective-C runtime, Xcode tools, and Apple TV. Ben’s contributions to notable open-source projects in the Open edX ecosystem show a pragmatic focus on error handling, API reliability, and testability, including refactors that made it easier to add new error types and use JSON outputs. Known for spotting problems and improving systems rather than accepting workarounds, he pairs strong engineering judgment with a history of shipping maintainable backend systems.
10 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (18)
api-rest10
data-service10
pytest10
python10
apidoc10
api-design10
restful-api10
django10
integrations10
webservice10
api10
edx10
rest-api10
backend10
unit-test10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
openedx-unsupported/ecommerce
Aug 2019 - Jun 2022
(Deprecated) Service for managing edX's product catalog and handling orders for those products
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:72 reviews, 33 commits, 64 PRs in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the ecommerce service, focusing on the `verify_transactions` command and its associated tests. Their work involved adding features such as error thresholds and enhanced output. Further contributions include refactoring code to facilitate easier addition of new error types and the use of JSON for output. They also addressed SDN check API integrations and handled deprecation warnings.
djangoedxproduct-catalogbackend-servicehandling
openedx/course-discovery
Dec 2018 - Apr 2019
Service providing access to consolidated course and program metadata
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 17 PRs, 56 pushes in 4 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on enhancing the course discovery backend service. Their contributions include implementing a new feature to aggregate course subjects for programs, exposing enrollment counts via the API, and refining program topic aggregation. They also made various improvements, such as removing a flaky test and refactoring code to address a specific bug.
data-managementconsolidateditilbackend-servicemetadata
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